The most surprising technologies that we find in devices such as mobiles and smartwatches are usually those that were not created expressly for the use that is given to them. This is where many of the functions that are usually used in accessibility functions come from, especially telephones, due to their strictly personal nature, but also watches, intended for people with some degree of disability, but also chronic diseases such as parkinson.
Last week a world congress dedicated to Parkinson’s was held in Barcelona. For this reason, a group of 20 cyclists –10 of them with Parkinson’s disease and 10 without the disease– set out by bicycle from the English city of Brighton in mid-June to cover nearly 1,600 kilometers and arrive in Barcelona last Sunday. , where they attended the congress that opened on Monday. The uniqueness of this race is that the runners carried an app called StrivePD and an Apple Watch throughout the entire journey. The goal of the organizers was to collect and analyze measurable and objective data before, during and after the 17-day bike marathon.
StrivePD is an app that uses the inertial sensors of the Apple Watch to analyze data such as tremor and dyskinesia – involuntary movements of the body that can affect Parkinson’s patients and that are usually related to the medication they take. The important thing about the fact that sick and non-sick people traveled the route under the same conditions is that the data on these symptoms can be calibrated much better, by being able to more clearly differentiate what is and what is not a tremor, since a bicycle rolling on a road is subjected to certain movements caused by the irregularities of the asphalt.
With StrivePD, the information on the daily fluctuations of the symptoms of each patient, which is stored in the iPhone app, allows the neurologist to have all the evolution of the patient since the previous visit to make the appropriate decisions. The app received approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a year ago to record tremor and dyskinesia in Parkinson’s patients.
Priya Kumar, head of communication at Rune Labs, notes that the idea behind StrivePD “was that as a patient, you go to the neurologist maybe once or twice a year, and it’s very difficult for a person to explain how they were yesterday or the day before, or even five weeks ago. And with the app you are constantly getting objective data for the doctor to make the best decisions about patient care.”
The app has numerous metrics, including mobility, settling, gait speed and the percentage of double support time, which “is a great tool because Parkinson’s patients are at greater risk of falling and allows doctors to be able to Looking at mobility you can see if they are at high risk of falling if they have to go to physical therapy or physiotherapy, if they have to be doing some kind of program to prevent falls, because that’s one of the main reasons for hospitalizations.” says Brianna Hood, a therapist who specializes in Parkinson’s patients.
Using a system that records patient movements in this way was possible because Apple puts an application programming interface (API) in the hands of developers called Movement Disorder Manager. In this way, any developer who wants to incorporate this data into an application can use this tool, which allows data to be obtained continuously without the patient having to do anything.
The creator of StrivePD is Aura Oslapas, a Parkinson’s patient -like her father-, who wanted to use this type of advance to improve her quality of life, and who finally sold it to Rune Labs. “Being able to show my neurologist how my motor symptoms fluctuated, thanks to StrivePD, was the impetus for me to have surgery on a deep brain stimulation device,” the patient explained.
Hood notes that with the app “doctors have the data to be able to make better decisions. In order for the patient to make changes to their medication schedule, if they start to notice the tremors coming on earlier in the day, that means maybe we should change their medication schedule.” medication”. He also points out that the information can be used to more precisely regulate deep brain stimulation devices that deliver an electrical current directly to areas of the brain and are used to treat diseases such as Parkinson’s and epilepsy. “Before we had this data,” he says, “it was a guessing game. They just tested it. You saw what you had been through and dealt with it. Now the decision-making is based on data.”
